Many business owners come to us and ask how to choose the best CRM software, the best online meeting software, the best social media marketing software, or the best email marketing software. There are literally 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of options that small business owners need to think about.
Here are four tips for business owners who are buying business software and want some help to make sure you make a good decision.
Did you find this video helpful? Let us know by dropping a comment below!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
Here's four tips for business owners who are buying business software and wanting some help making sure you make a good decision. Hi, there, my name is Pete Moriarty, and for over 10 years, we've helped literally 1000s of business owners all over the world help get their technology, right. And if you're new to our channel, welcome, we have an amazing growth roadmap, which helps businesses no matter what stage of business you're at, in your technology strategy, right, so you can grow a more successful business. Now, I love helping small business owners, we're based in Australia, we have customers all over the world in both our audience and our consulting businesses as well. And we help businesses make great choices around technology. And we tend to spend most of our time helping with Google workspace and the add ons and ecosystem around the Google workspace kind of setup. But for us, many business owners will come to us and ask for, hey, how do I choose the best CRM software? Or how do I choose the best online meeting software? Or how do I choose the best social media marketing software, or the best email marketing software? And there are literally 1000s, if not 10s, of 1000s of options that small business owners need to think about? And so before we get started on actually, you know, running down the road of like, what are the features? And what are the benefits of any piece of software. But we need to get started and get clear on what is the goal, it's very easy for business owners to get into the arena of bright shiny object syndrome, where you know, you're seeing ads on something like Instagram, and you're jumping onto software there because it's exciting, or a friend recommend something to you. Or maybe you go to a seminar or a webinar, and they say, Hey, this is the latest and greatest tool that everybody should be using. And everyone tends to jump on it. Now, as entrepreneurs, our core skill is that we're good at adapting to change. And we're good at starting things. But we're not always great at finishing things early. And so what tends to happen is we can sign up for a lot of different apps and services, but not necessarily actually finished, or fully implement them. And what tends to happen for small business owners is quite often you go and sign up to a bunch of trials and sign up to a bunch of different applications. And then you end up just having a ping, ping, ping, ping, ping your credit card, without you remembering. And so we want to avoid that subscription, overwhelm, we want to avoid starting things or not finishing them. And we do that by first being very clear about our goal, before we sign up to a piece of software. So what is the goal? What do we want to achieve? What is the actual, you know, the execution that we need? What is this going to help us solve for the business, not just for my excitement? But what is this going to help me solve for the business? After we've done that our next step is going to be to scope out a process flow. And you might think, Oh, my God, Pete, now you're getting boring with the spreadsheets and you're getting bogged down in the flowcharts? No, no, trust me on this, we're going to scope out a process flow, because this is very, very important to choosing the right kind of software, once you know the business process that you're looking to solve and maybe that business processes launching a marketing campaign, or, you know, creating a webinar funnel, or maybe it's hiring a new employee, or maybe it's delivering a project building a house or you know, creating a widget, if you're a design business, any of those is going to have a set of steps in that and we've got other videos on how to systemize your business. Well, basically creating and scoping out a process flow is going to help you understand what are the things that need to happen in this business that this technology tool can support to happen. And importantly, when you have a technology tool, it needs to wrap around and meet and manage your business processes, not the other way around. So we're not going to shift our business to match the technology tool. Ideally, we want to technology tool that's going to fit in with our business process. So once we've got that mapped out in a process, then we're going to have an idea of what requirements we might have. And so step number three is to create our requirements map. Now, the requirements map is typically a spreadsheet, it's a list of features a list of things that this piece of technology needs to do. And I've got a dedicated video just on you know, what are the requirements? And how can you identify those requirements? And how can you actually make great choices once you've got a list of different pieces of software that you're interested in evaluating. But for now, we're just gonna start with that requirements map. What are all the different requirements after we've gone through our process flow, and we're gonna list them out on a spreadsheet, in the columns there. And then we've got them all listed and ready to go to go to our evaluation stage. And you got it. Step number four is the evaluation stage. This is where we try before we buy. Great idea that now we can just punch in unfortunately have to punch in a credit card in the most cases, but punch in a credit card. Get started on a 30 day trial for new pieces of software and start seeing whether or not this is going to work in your business. Now, it may be a better use of your time to delegate this to someone else on your team, or to work with a consultancy like our company it genius to help you evaluate different pieces of technology, but there's no hurdle in trying before you buy, as long as you make sure you remember to cancel any of those accounts so they don't automatically rebuild. And that's a great task to either give to a team member if you're not so great at remembering things or putting it in your calendar or to do lists to remind yourself to cancel that subscription. try before you buy thank God for the SAS revolution of service Software as a Service, because that means that we can typically try most apps without having to commit to massive amounts of capital expenditure. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you like these tips, leave us a comment down below and let us know if these were useful. Otherwise, I'd love to see you in the next video, hit that subscribe button. If you'd like to see more, give us a thumbs up if you'd like that content. And if you're a business owner who is new to the channel, please go ahead and check out our other videos in our playlists. Because we've got certain playlists for every different level of business you're at right now giving you as much support as we can with your technology strategy. Now if you're an existing user of Google workspace, we have a pretty phenomenal transfer in offer that is for free, and the link is down below. And you get access to our support team as well as a free account chat. And you also get access to our Google Classroom, which gives you a library of training videos for you and your team to help you get the most out of your Google investment. Now one of those courses is our inbox zero course which has helped literally 10s of 1000s of customers get their inboxes down to zero every single day using Gmail. If you're interested in that jump on the link below and you can get access super quickly just by filling out a form and we'll see you on the other side. Till next time. Catch you in the next video.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
